Who remembers when Google wasn’t our go to search engine and we relied on the likes of a rather well-dressed chap named Jeeves?
With Google being close to 80% of the global market share, it’s no surprise the competitors have slowly faded into the background. But who were they, and how many of us used them?
Over 30% of you named Yahoo was your first search engine and yet now it only claims a global market share of just under 5%.
In second place, we have two search engines coming in with 17% of you voting for Alta Vista and 17% of you voting Ask Jeeves.
Interestingly enough, Yahoo was founded in 1995, as was Alta Vista, whereas Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996. But to see Lycos in joint third place just hurts as it was my first search engine and was founded in 1994. You’re all clearly too late to the party!
Also in third place was MSN, now known as Bing – Which unsurprisingly holds the second largest global market share with 7.31%.
However, although I’m sure most of us are using Google, I wouldn’t consider Bing a goner just yet. Afterall, it is the voice search function for iPhones and the Amazon Echo and Alexa.
If, of course, you do have any questions relating to search engines, Google, Bing, etc, the guys at SGM are more than happy to help!
As you know, SGM doesn’t like to do things by halves! This year, the business threw a summer party like no other: #Quiltonbury.
The garden of the Quilter Residence transformed into #Quiltonbury, and took a small Kentish village by storm. Giants were treated to good music, an open outdoor bar, a BBQ with unlimited food, a face painter (glitter beards are the next best SGM thing), a bucking bronco (our Giants have hips of steel), gladiator (harder than it looks), and a bouncy castle.
Festivities began at 1pm, with Giants being welcomed with an official #Quiltonbury festival wristband and purple sunglasses (we’re always on brand!). SGM has been fortunate enough to experience a lot of business successes recently, so #Quiltonbury was the perfect way to celebrate. The highly anticipated SGM summer raffle was also held, with not one but three Giants winning a prize of their choosing this year!
Things get somewhat fuzzy from around 8pm onwards, but we know it was a great night! Do you have any ideas of how we can top #Quiltonbury for next year?
P.S. if you’re an SGM client, you’re invited to the client #Quiltonbury summer party on 29th July, see you there!
Everyone is more than welcome at GIANTtalks in order to learn valuable digital marketing takeaways for their business – but it’s a different story for those who want to speak at a GIANTtalks. This, we save for a select few.
For this month’s Agency Insider, we wanted to take you behind the scenes to give you an idea of what GIANTtalks has to offer you as an agency partner (whether you want to attend for the knowledge and networking, or increase your thought leadership by being a speaker).
Follow me through our 8th GIANTtalks at Foyles bookshop as I ask both agencies that have previously spoken, and agencies that are new to the event, what they like about GIANTtalks.
Apologies in advance for the sound quality, turning subtitles on is heavily recommended!
And if you are interested in becoming a speaker, please do get in touch!
We know that since you’re an agency partner, you’re more than aware of the importance of site speed, but you might not necessarily know how your website fares against the rest.
There was only one way to find out! We got out the stopwatch, opened up incognito mode and timed how long it took to load your site on both desktop and mobile.
Interestingly enough, the majority of the sites loaded in under 1 second… for desktop and this is great news!
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that mobile has officially overtaken desktop now and the results showed that the majority of the sites loaded between 3-5 seconds. What did we learn from the video? 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
What better way to demonstrate site speed than a race between Sleeping Giant Media and GIANT Campus! Site speed is one of those subtle requirements that make all the difference. In fact, it’s so subtle that every millisecond counts.
Here are some of the stats we used in the video in case you missed them:
100 milliseconds Amazon: Increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improvement
1.2 seconds Shopzilla: Increased revenue by 12% and page views by 25% by speeding up load time from 6 seconds to 1.2
2 seconds 1 out 2 people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds
3 seconds 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load
Here’s a particularly useful doc we found explaining site speed even more:
This was an incredibly interesting question for us to pose to you as we really had no idea what the general mindset was. Which if anything, is the whole point of why we’re doing the agency poll.
Sometimes, we even amaze ourselves.
To begin with, the results heavily leaned towards being worse off with answers such as “How can it be anything but worse? The whole world will be worse”, “A lot of my client’s business is in Europe” and “People tend to spend less when they are worried”. It was looking bleak to say the least!
Interestingly though, the results shifted towards being better off as we got in touch with more of you. It appears that a lot of you have actually seen opportunity through the confusion and seized this as a chance to better yourselves for the road that lies ahead.
In fact, some of you told us that the weaker pound has actually made us more appealing to companies overseas; and for companies within the UK, they’re starting to put their branding and marketing higher up on the agenda to sustain the success of their business.
Whether or not we can predict the ripples of politics, the important takeaway from this poll is to buckle in and prepare yourself to be adaptable. As I heard on Radio 4 the other morning:
“Stress can trigger a natural cycle of rupture and repair; when things go wrong and we attempt to repair them. Through this, it is possible to develop the capacity to be more resilient where the rupture repairs more robustly than it was before.”
And if you’re still after something to make you feel a bit more positive, I’ll leave this gem with you:
